The Story Behind DisabilityMatch
Meredith did not set out to build a dating site. She spent twelve years working across the UK's Midlands region helping employers and public services understand what meaningful accessibility looks like beyond the legal minimum. It was practical, unglamorous work. Auditing forms. Rewriting guidance documents. Sitting in meetings where people used the word "inclusive" and meant something considerably narrower.
Her MS diagnosis arrived at thirty-one, mid-career. What followed were years of navigating dating on platforms that had not been built with her situation in mind. Not hostile. Just thoughtless. Profiles asked for height and body type, not for the things that actually mattered to someone trying to figure out whether a first date would be accessible. Conversations stalled the moment her condition came up, not because people were cruel, but because they did not know what to say and had no frame for it.
She had coffee with enough people in similar situations to know the gap was structural, not personal. The problem was not that disabled people were hard to love. The problem was that the infrastructure for finding love had been built by people who had never had to think about it.
DisabilityMatch grew from that understanding. It launched in 2020 with a straightforward premise: a space built for people who did not want to spend the first three weeks of knowing someone deciding whether and how to disclose. What it had, from the beginning, was honesty. A space where a wheelchair, a fluctuating condition, or a diagnosis not yet fully named could be part of who you were, not the only thing about you.
She remains based in Birmingham and builds things that work for people who have been let down by things that did not. The platform now serves more than 159,300 members across the UK, US, and Australia. The team is small, the moderation is human, and the direction has not changed.